(no subject)

This morning, as i was leaving the house, i pointed out the bright cheery sunflower in our lush deck garden to Christine. We paused a moment to take in the bright blue sky, the third quarter moon, the redwoods: a lovely day. We continue to be very amused by the cats and how they hang out around each other. The orange gang has ... competition? groupies? Last night a svelte black cat with white socks and a splash was watching Luigi, Edward and Franklin. Christine is sure Socks (as the Missing Cat posters proclaimed the name some time back) is a female cat. And then in another building, where the door to the unit and the landing face ours, also looking over the little lawn, a calico has been perching and observing the comings and goings of the orange boys. Another female cat, i think (with genetics to support that assumption), and this morning she was on the lawn in an alert and observing pose, watching Franklin.

Edward meowed greetings from a neighbor's patio as i walked by.

I noticed a hawk observing a merge area from a street lamp as i zoomed into the office, and in the front water feature i saw a hen duck was leading around seven or eight new hatchlings. A second clutch for the season, i suppose, and not uncommon around here.

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Various notes:

* Passed on "Pangur Ban," our first Living Room media Mac, to DP's partner L and met them for dinner at The Creamery at Stanford Shopping Center. It was pleasant for my brain dead state. Had a porter instead of a milk shake.

* Have the weirdest down load pattern going on:
The intense downloads seemed to start at the same time as our netflix watching but then continued in half-hour bursts on the hour for a day. Complete mystery. We've seen similar behavior before as we try to figure out what's going on. Our guy is being so helpful, but then Sonic.net Fusion seems like it would be much more bandwidth for a very similar price. But who knows who is downloading what from some akami server via our network connection. Why pay for them to have better download performance? We really don't think this is a wifi thief as the behavior was observed the day after we swapped out our old wifi endpint and installed another with much better security. So what is downloading?

* TEA STILL MISSING.

* Tonight I participate in the Friendly practice of "Friendly Eights".... except there are only six in our group, and only two others tonight. Both a food potluck and a conversation potluck
, I guess.